We all know the Amiga was prolific at the number of games released for it. I'm curious to know whether people think it would have been better off having fewer games that were better?

If a turkey along the lines of "Human Killing Machine", "Street Fighter" or "Army Moves" wasn't released for the Amiga, would it have made any difference to anything? Were we better off at least having a version of a game on the Amiga, even if it stunk to high heaven?

There were a few poor ST ports that I personally loved. None of the ones you mentioned by the way.

So if you were a kid and didnt know any better some of these games could have been appreciated if you had nothing to compare them to.

If ST owners could boast having more exclusives, even turkey exclusives it might have changed which computer kids chose to bug their parents to buy them.

Imagine for example a kid that loved ChaseHQ at the arcades and then he hears there is a version coming to the ST but no version for the amiga... Its a pretty bad conversion and a poor ST port... but god damn it I love it.

I've certainly seen some dire PD games which should never have been released. But in terms of commercial games, more is generally better, and even the naff ones can have a certain appeal. I confess for example to occasionally playing Army Moves, not saying it's a good game though...

I agree with TCD (just look at the sheer number of crap titles released on current platforms for proof) but I would add that the thread title rings true for the Amiga's later years. Not helped by some magazines (Amiga Format and CU Amiga were really terrible for this) giving many below-par titles inflated marks to encourage people to buy them and "support the Amiga market" - thereby managing to both discourage developers from putting the time in to produce something decent, and probably putting people off from buying many more Amiga games after they'd bought a couple recommended by their favourite mag, only to find they weren't quite up to scratch. The Amiga really could have done with more good games then.

At least with PD games nobody lost out and nobody really cared too much. It's not like they were made for a quick buck either.

So if you were a kid and didnt know any better some of these games could have been appreciated if you had nothing to compare them to.

So true. Alien Syndrome was one of my first Amiga games, I spent countless hours playing it. It wasn't until the internet days that I was told what a bad conversion it was, how terrible the absence of scrolling made it etc. I bet many of us have similar stories about several titles.

Sometimes when there's nobody around to tell you how bad a game is, you happen to enjoy it.

I guess one man's trash is another man's treasure, so even the most naff game might well be seen as a work of genius by another!

One thing I will add, magazine reviews often used to say things like "not a great conversion but fans of the arcade should check it out". I personally think this is around the wrong way. If you loved the arcade and knew a lot about it, you will probably be terribly disappointed by what a lousy conversion the game was, whereas someone that wasn't a fan wouldn't notice.

A perfect example would be someone that liked say IK+ or beat-em-ups but hadn't seen Street Fighter 2 - they might well think SF2 by US Gold was an awesome game. People that loved the arcade would no doubt be terribly disappointed by how slow it was and all the stuff missing.

When it comes to games this, as I believe it, all comes down to support of the platform.

Good titles, lesser titles, the fact titles are being made one should celebrate... perhaps not the titles themselves however.

To be honest what makes a good game good, will always be subjective and what makes a good game great, well that's like catching lightning isn't it.

There are a lot of.... shall we say humble games out there that I really enjoy... like super foul eggs... (btw that's made in Amos surprisingly!). to be fair there is a lot of PD released stuff that rivals the playability / fun of the highly prized and sought after commercial releases.

So, would the Amiga of benefited from lesser yet better titles, I would say no... one of the beauties of the machine was its complete openness and without any bar of entry to start making content on the machine. unlike the state of play the last 3 generations of consoles have brought.

Ironically, the closed systems suffer from "the same game different graphics syndrome" and lets be honest, the Nintendo format is plagued by tired I.P's and mountains of shovel-ware

so I would say that less is not more, in fact when in reference to a home computer/ gaming system - more is more

"the same game different graphics syndrome" - I like the gameplay, but I don't like the graphics, I think I will try that similar game I saw. Ah, this is suits me better.

Any machine with a lot of bad games will have a lot of good games. PS1 and PS2?
Choice can never really harm the machine the games are played on. I am sure there are plenty of people who don't like the games that the majority considers as good.
Good ideas can come from bad games too, then another developer could take that idea and put it in a supposedly good game.

I suppose bad games could affect the popularity of the machine, like what is currently happening with the Wii, but the Wii's choice of good games is a bit lacking compared to other machines. The Wii is only really for games though, but when you bought an Amiga, you were not limited to games only.

Overall I would say it is not about how many bad games there are on a machine, but how many good games there are.

Crap games are only justifiable when you have a thriving piracy scene... because whilst such a scene acts opens your eyes to every available game, both good and bad and takes away some of the "Not knowing better" factor, at the same time it removes any negative connotations from the process of acquiring that game... and as such you can enjoy it for what it really is, rather than what it cost you, and what opportunities you may have missed by picking that one.

One of the worst elements of the modern gaming scene to me then, at least on PC is the amount of buggy crap that is released and the PC gamer is just expected to suck up; that the magazines and online reviewers don't in turn call out because they've been told it'll be patched later, or their advertising budget depends on giving The Mark Of The Beast (73%) and whilst piracy exists, it takes you into dangerous virus infested waters, which the average consumer isn't likely to risk, and one mis-step can bork up even the cautious downloader. So game companies treat it as a blank check to just keep shovelling crap out there, investing more in DRM to force you to pay a value for their software that it is absolutely not worth, and driving gamers away emotionally from the entire industry...

... but when you can just copy 20 or 30 games to a cassette recorder; well you can play even the crap ones for a little while and not feel too abused. And then go and willingly pay for the ones you've heard are genuinely good... because you still love gaming.

I do too. But it's hard when you have found you're "Other Half" in the relationship is increasingly abusive...

I don't mind the rather large amount of bad and mediocre games for the Amiga... what troubles me is when a game that is brilliant on some other platform is butchered for the Amiga release.

I like how the spectrum of Amiga games is so wide, from complete rubbish to really great games. And - I have a hard time seeing how this could be avoided as the Amiga was such an open platform compared to the various consoles and all that, which is a very good thing.

Personally, I feel the crap ST ports did more harm than good to the Amiga.

For quite a while, if you told any console owner at the time that the Amiga was capable of destroying the Atari ST, and was superior in every way, you'd have to have had some sympathy when they flat out didn't believe you.

Now I use Shadow of the Beast as my benchmark title, because that showed that with effort, you could have something that utilised the Amiga properly. We're not discussing gameplay, we all know its suspect, but clearly you can see the effort that went into doing the game.

With some notable exceptions, we were very poorly accommodated by the UK software companies to such an extent that we invariably only got better music over the ST version, and frankly I find that unforgiveable.

When you look back at some of the early games that did make a real effort to make the Amiga version something special, it irks me to this day that there wasn't more competition to attempt to outdo other programming teams like there is today on the 360 and PS3.

Yes, it meant that the Amiga got a version of the game, but it wasn't an Amiga version, and especially when back in day, you invariably had to pay an extra £5 for the Amiga version with virtually no enhancements.

So no, poor games didn't do the Amiga any favours at all, and often times I heard "the Amiga can do better than that" which says all it needs to say.